Stop Paying for Data That is Free

Sorry, I’m calling it. Businesses purchasing subscriptions to companies that are offering free data at a hugely premium price need to stop paying for this now. Stop wasting your money. Hell, give it all to a charity of your choice, it will be better money spent.

The company I’m talking about, for anyone working in digital will be well aware who this is, but for legal purposes let’s just call them a fictitious name which bears no resemblance to any company or person which happens to have a similar name, EnquiryForensics.

The offer for these types of companies is that you can “See who is looking at your website”. In summary, no you can’t. The only information that these types of companies generally provide is information that someone in Company X was looking at your website, then joining this data together with generic contact details for this company or publically accessible contact information for various staff within this organisation. This does not tell you who specifically is looking at your website. There are a whole host of data protection issues with tracking individual user website usage which is why services like Google Analytics are obliged to anonymise certain aspects of the data.

So beware, any company trying to sell you access to a tool or service which can show you who is looking at your website in a company, it is likely a snake oil salesman or company. You can generally get whatever data that have completely for free, and here’s how.

Google Analytics is Awesome

I’m not going to go into depth about Google Analytics. In summary though, Google Analytics tracks over 560 points of data for every website visitor and when you know where to look, you too can start to see how valuable this data is.

Identify the Companies Looking at your Website

Simple. Within Google Analytics, go to the following report: Audience > Technology > Network. This report will show you the companies who have been looking at your website, which can be extremely valuable for any type of B2B business as you can then feed this into your outreach pipeline and support the work your business development manager is doing on a daily basis. Look;

It’s all there. The companies who have been looking at your website which you can filter through to your hearts contempt. For any companies listed within here which are SMEs, a quick Google search for the company name and check on LinkedIn will soon allow you to identify the relevant person to speak with in the company who could be interested in your products and services.

Even better, you can then begin to filter down by looking at these individual companies and see what pages they viewed on your website too, so that you get a better understanding of what they are looking for.

The key here is not to be too creepy though when you reach out to these people.

All in all, you rarely ever need to pay for premium services and tools which allow you to identify who is looking at your website. With a bit of know-how, you can have access to all of this type of information for free.

If you want to find out how Google Analytics can help your business, get in touch.

Michael founded Contrado Digital in 2013. He has experience working with national and multi-national brands in a wide range of industries, helping them achieve awesome results. Michael regularly speaks at local universities and industry events while keeping up with the latest trends in the digital industry.